In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate

The shari`a has both letter and spirit. Terse and technical manuals of Islamic Law rarely bring out the spirit on their own. Students normally learn the spirit by studying these manuals from godfearing shaykhs.

When a student has awe and reverence for a godfearing shaykh, he learns more than how to pick apart a terse legal expression. The shaykh impresses a mark on the reverent student’s soul. When the student later becomes a shaykh in his own right, he not will solve legal questions merely based on a terse expression in an ancient text. Instead, the person that his shaykh was–which is the person that he has now become–will forcefully guide and steer him to answers that breathe spirit into the terse letter of the law.

But this will only happen if he goes to his shaykh with reverence. If he merely sees his shaykh as someone from whom to squeeze out information, he will learn with his mind, but not with his soul. He will only learn the letter of the law and his answers to legal questions will reflect his own person, not the person of someone better than him. His answers will then either be harsh or permissive, depending on the faults of his person.

The way to tell if you’ve learned the shari`a in both letter and spirit is to examine how you solve legal questions. If you see your shaykh in the pages of the ancient texts that you reference and if thoughts like “My shaykh would never say something like that!” run through your mind, it’s a sign that you’ve learned something more than just the letter. If all you see is your own intelligence deciphering black ink on yellow parchment, it’s a sign that you didn’t learn what your shaykh wanted to teach you, even if you spent forty years at his feet.